A Tale of a Lonely Parish eBook

The squire doubted whether he would be willing to
exchange his personality for that of Mr. Booley.

“Well—­what then?” he said.
“I think I would try to be merciful.”

“Yes; but suppose that in being merciful, you
just allowed that lady the time necessary to present
her beloved husband with a convenient little pill,
just to shorten his sufferings? And suppose that—­”

“Really, Mr. Booley, I think you make very unwarrantable
suppositions,” said Mr. Juxon severely.
“I cannot suppose any such thing.”

“Many women—­ladies too—­have
done that to save a man from hanging,” returned
Mr. Booley, fixing his grey eye on the squire.

“Hanging?” repeated the latter in surprise.
“But Goddard is not to be hanged.”

“Of course he is. What did you expect?”
Mr. Booley looked surprised in his turn.

“But—­what for?” asked the squire
very anxiously. “He has not killed anybody—­”

“Oh—­then you don’t know how
he escaped?”

“No—­I have not the least idea—­pray
tell me.”

“I don’t wonder you don’t understand
me, then,” said Mr. Booley. “Well,
it is a short tale but a lively one, as they say.
Of course it stands to reason in the first place that
he could not have got out of Portland. He was
taken out for a purpose. You know that after his
trial was over, all sorts of other things besides
the forgery came out about him, proving that he was
altogether a very bad lot. Now about three weeks
ago there was a question of identifying a certain
person—­it was a very long story, with a
bad murder case and all the rest of it—­commonplace,
you know the sort—­never mind the story,
it will all be in the papers before long when they
have got it straight, which is more than I have, seeing
that these affairs do get a little complicated occasionally,
you know, as such things will.” Mr. Booley
paused. It was evident that his command of the
English tongue was not equal to the strain of constructing
a long sentence.

“This person, whom he was to identify, was the
person murdered?” inquired Mr. Juxon.

“Exactly. It was not the person, but the
person’s body, so to say. Somebody who
had been connected with the Goddard case was sure that
if Goddard could be got out of prison he could do
the identifying all straight. It did not matter
about his being under sentence of hard labour—­it
was a private case, and the officer only wanted Goddard’s
opinion for his personal satisfaction. So he goes
to the governor of Portland, and finds that Goddard
had a very good character in that institution—­he
was a little bit of a gay deceiver, you see, and knew
how to fetch the chaps in there and particularly the
parson. So he had a good character. Very
good. The governor consents to send him to town
for this private job, under a strong force—­that
means three policemen—­with irons on his
hands. When they reached London they put him in
a fourwheeler. Those things are done sometimes,
and nobody is the wiser, because the governor does
it on his own responsibility, for the good of the law,
I suppose. I never approved of it. Do you
follow me, Mr. Juxon?”